Query Inseparability and Module Extraction in OWL 2 QL

The OWL 2 QL profile of OWL, based on the DL family of description logics, is emerging as a major language for developing new ontologies and approximating existing ones. Its main application is ontology-based data access, where ontologies are used to provide background knowledge for answering queries over data. We give a survey of recent results on the computational complexity of checking query inseparability for OWL 2 QL ontologies and analyse the impact of various OWL 2 QL constructs in the context of query inseparability. We also discuss practical query inseparability checking and minimal module extraction algorithms, as well as experimental results.